Using the Thesaurus to your benefit
PubMed uses an alphabetically sorted, hierarchical Thesaurus made up of the NLM's Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH for short, which is a controlled vocabulary - meaning the words and phrases used to index all of the citations are chosen in order to keep a rigid structure that makes it easy to search for users and organize for compilers.
Autocomplete
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to discontinue using autofill click "Turn Off" on the bottom right of the box
When you type breast cancer screening into the search bar, you'll notice that, like Google, a drop down menu opens trying to finish the word or phrase for you from the MeSH index (including synonyms).
Automatic Term Mapping
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by choosing "see more" under Search Details in the right sidebar you'll find yourself on this page (click the photo)
If a word or phrase is entered into the search bar without qualification automatic translation occurs. Say you enter breast cancer screening without an identified field (e.g. [AU] or [TIAB]), the phrase will be searched in the Subject, Journal, and Author/Investigator Indexes to try and find a match. If nothing is found, the phrase is broken into separate words and searched individually. For more information, check out this helpful tutorial.
Under ATM searching, the default search fields are MeSH terms and All Fields, ORed together.
Under ATM searching, the default search fields are MeSH terms and All Fields, ORed together.
WARNING!
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by choosing "see more" under Search Details in the right sidebar you'll find yourself on this page (click the photo)
Automatic term mapping will not always steer you in the right direction! If you're trying to search by author but don't know or don't think to restrict the search to the Author field, searching Black will only show you its synonym African American. You can easily fix this by adding an initial (i.e. Black R) or using the field tag (i.e. Black[AU] or using the dropdown menu in Advanced Search mode).